In the last year or so, I have heard more and more the idea of "programming is dead!" or even "programming is dying". Often even by people that are either programmers themselves or even educators of programming.
Multiple reasons are given when this comes up. Some of them include:
- ChatGPT can already solve this! In the future, they™️ won't need anyone anymore!
- All the interesting things have long been done! There isn't any progress anymore!
I've picked these two because those represent the three general ideas that seem to be floating around.
- Ai is coming for my job!
- human labor and intellect will be worthless!
- there is nothing to figure out anymore, since established businesses exist, and they can do things™️.
I have said many times I am a hopeless optimist, and maybe it's time to make that a thing about me. I have a few responses to this mindset:
- Yes, AI might make parts of what you currently do trivial. But there is a huge blind spot here: This happened with programming a few times over already. And we were able to say "ok, now that we don't need to do that anymore, let us focus on the important things now!". If you have ever increased the performance of a program, you will know, the users will just build more complex stuff. I suspect this will happen with more powerful AI coding tools as well.
- If you have new and powerful tools, you need to wield them correctly. That will always require humans. Also, if you think that the value of human intellect is intrinsically tied to its ability to perform, then I recommend re-evaluating your image of what is valuable.
- Businesses also use math since forever. That hasn't stopped math progressing or being used in more and more creative ways. It may seem that a lot of dust has settled in programming, especially when you currently work for an established business that has done things the same way for decades at this point, but a lot is also in flux right this moment. Companies and projects crumble and fail, new ones spawn, and sometimes we now achieve what we couldn't in past times.
One of the wildest things to me is how one sentiment is basically: "a storm is brewing and going to swallow us all." and another is "there is only stagnation and decay". These two can't be true at the same time. What I completely dislike about the overlap of these is the idea that the future holds nothing but despair, and we steer towards a world devoid of hope, goals and purpose.
I cannot make predictions about the job market or economies but I want to share the most influential thing someone said to me when I was studying mathematics in university that I think also holds mostly true for programming: "The beautiful thing about math is: It doesn't require anything fancy. Nobody can stop you doing it."
I have a draft that I might post at a later date about doing useless work that can grant great purpose and I believe is valuable. The bottom line is:
Things aren't valuable in itself! Things only hold value, because they are valuable to someone. You cannot take people out of the equation. The world will still hold beauty, purpose and value. If it didn't, we would search for and give it that value. We would create that beauty. And in that, one can also find purpose.